Archive for August, 2010
Suicidal Shrimp and other unintended consequences
I read this article today and provokes much thought…what are the true consequences today and tomorrow of the pharmaceutical compounds that we’ve been glibly flushing down the drain for the last 50 years under instructions from our learned government and medical colleagues?
What is the impact on plants, humans and other animal life? What filtration technologies are truly capable of removing pharmaceuticals and other organic compounds properly from our drinking water? I’m glad I have a whole house filtration system AND a reverse osmosis processor!
http://io9.com/5584563/antidepressants-in-the-water-are-making-shrimp-suicidal
Antidepressants in the water are making shrimp suicidal
Improving human mental health is having some serious unintended consequences for our friends in the ocean. Exposure to antidepressants makes shrimp five times more likely to place themselves in life-threatening situations, and the broader effects could damage the entire ecosystem.
Exposure to the antidepressant fluoxetine causes shrimp to radically alter their behavior. While normal shrimp are more likely to avoid swimming towards light because it’s often associated with prey like birds or fishermen, those exposed to fluoxetine become five times more likely to swim towards light than away from it. That change in behavior places them in harm’s way, and if enough shrimp are exposed to the antidepressant the entire population could be at risk.
Alex Ford, a marine biologist at the UK’s University of Portsmouth, explains how that can reverberate throughout the oceanic ecosystem and why this is a serious concern:
Crustaceans are crucial to the food chain and if shrimps’ natural behaviour is being changed because of antidepressant levels in the sea this could seriously upset the natural balance of the ecosystem. Much of what humans consume you can detect in the water in some concentration. We’re a nation of coffee drinkers and there is a huge amount of caffeine found in waste water, for example. It’s no surprise that what we get from the pharmacy will also be contaminating the country’s waterways.
Ford exposed some shrimp to the same amount of fluoxetine that humans excrete into the waste water that gets carried out to sea. He found that even this seemingly small amount was enough to trigger this major behavioral change in the shrimp. He had been motivated to investigate this question by a parasite that is known to cause such changes by altering serotonin levels in shrimp. He wanted to find out whether the same deleterious result could be obtained using human antidepressants; the answer, sadly, is yes.
He explains how small individual amounts of antidepressants adds up to a big problem:
Effluent [outflowing waste water] is concentrated in river estuaries and coastal areas, which is where shrimps and other marine life live — this means that the shrimps are taking on the excreted drugs of whole towns.
Prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed in recent years, but this is one of the very first attempts to figure out what ecological impact all that pharmaceutical sewage could have. The most worrying part of it all is that this might just be the tip of an ecosystem-altering iceberg – there are lots of other drugs other than fluoxetine that affect serotonin levels, and Ford hasn’t even tested any of those yet to see what they do to shrimp and other marine organisms.
Send an email to Alasdair Wilkins, the author of this post, at alasdair@io9.com.
Case Study: Is your softener running backwards?
You install a water softener for your customer. Years go by with uninterrupted, trouble-free performance. Your customer adds salt as directed, they have the system cleaned and disinfected every year by an authorized service provider; life is good and everyone is happy.
A few months after their most recent cleaning, disinfection, and preventative maintenance service the customer reports an interruption in their soft water. No big deal, it is a 10 year old system and probably needs a mechanical repair or resin augmentation… You dispatch a technician who determines that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the system. She cycles it, produces soft water and makes an adjustment to the efficiency setting on the system to accommodate for potential fluctuations in influent hardness….everyone’s happy for a week or two and then the client reports no soft water again!
You now dispatch a level 2 technician who checks every single faucet and fixture in the home to confirm no hard water crossovers… Everything is fine and he even opens the system to test the ion exchange resin and confirm the integrity of the valve/distributor interface. He short-cycles the system and produces glorious soft water! Customer is happy and the level 2 tech promises to return next week to follow-up.
No contact from the customer and the tech visits the home, expecting to be hailed as the conquering hero; none such luck. Client is friendly, bit firmly insistent that their water is not soft and they now doubt his ability to actually diagnose and repair softeners.Tech checks everything on the system again and it works fine mechanically again. Tech cycles the system completely and produces 800 gallons of soft water. Tech and customer are both confused now.
This is a rare situation that is fast becoming frustrating and costly. So what do we do?
A level 3 technician is dispatched to the home and looks at the problem holistically, assuming nothing; taking the time to evaluate the system as it operated through a partial regeneration cycle. He also carefully interviewed the homeowner about any recent changes in the home, such as new appliances, fixtures or plumbing repairs. He took detailed notes of what he saw:
- Influent Hardness – 30gpg
- Influent TDS – 580ppm
- Effluent Hardness Cold – 20gpg
- Effluent TDS Cold – 420ppm
- Effluent Hardness Hot – 19gpg
- Effluent TDS Hot – 940ppm
- Hardness after regeneration – 4gpg
- TDS after regeneration – 525ppm
- Influent pressure static – 32psi
- Influent pressure @ 5gpm flow – 20psi
He opened the brine tank and carefully inspected the air-check assembly for obstructions. He checked the safety brine valve assembly for proper functionality and air ingress. He checked all fittings to and from the softener and everything seemed to be within specifications. He placed the system into regeneration again, and closed the inlet supply valve on the 3-handle bypass….water continued to flow down the drain. Being a larger home, he assumed this to be normal and let it run. After 2 minutes, he deduced that this was NOT normal and began to look for causes of this anomalous situation. Stepping back in the mechanical room, he noticed that there was a newly installed hot water recirculation pump running on a timer. He unplugged the pump and the anomalous flow immediately stopped.
Hot water recirculation pumps are a great way to provide homeowners with fast access to hot water, and they are becoming more common as prices decrease and plumbers become more comfortable with new technologies. While fast hot water is great, recirculation pumps can present a distinct problem for any venturi-based water softening, conditioning, or filtration appliance when improperly sized or installed without consideration for the water tr
eatment system.
The recirculation pump in this particular home was over-sized for the application, causing it to develop excessive pressure on the recirculation line which in turn forced water into the outlet of the water softener during regeneration.
When the water softener cleans, it relies on the venturi effect (passing a volume of fluid past an orifice to generate “vacuum”. This vacuum sucks regenerant fluid from the regenerant tank into the media bed to perform a cleaning or regeneration cycle. If the flow of water past the orifice is interrupted, there will be inadequate or intermittent vacuum, which can cause a host of complications.
This poor water softener was being intermittently exposed to pressure differentials that precluded it from regenerating properly, and also from adequately rinsing away the regeneration byproducts.
The fix to this situation was a simple check valve, installed immediately downstream of the softener before the hot water recirculation return line, preventing this problem from ever occurring again.
The devil is always in the details.
Fractional Brining, What’s the big deal?
I was speaking with one of my dealers this week while laid up recuperating from cancer surgery and he commented to me that one of his new employees didn’t “buy into” fractional brining. Once I’d finished laughing hysterically, we discussed the disinformation out there from vendors of generic systems who have no innovative capabilities. I also realized that some people just don’t know any better…
“Fractional Brining” is the trademarked term that describes Intermountain Water Products’ unique way to regenerate ion-exchange systems.
In days of yore (1920 – late 1960′s in most cases) , water softeners were installed in homes as “Portable Exchange” devices. Once exhausted, they would be removed from the home or business, and then exchanged with another tank. Thee exhausted tank was recharged or regenerated at a central location.
This portable exchange method was only feasible until transportation costs became prohibitive, and innovative manufacturers developed ways to manually regenerate water softeners “in-situ” – in place.
Manual regeneration was performed by regenerating with table salt once the water started feeling hard or on a predetermined schedule. the system would be valved out of service, the top of the tank would be
opened, salt inserted, valved back online, and then rinsed through a household fixture.
In the late 1960′s, innovators like Erie Controls developed methods for actually regenerating softeners without opening them up. The “semi-automatic” timer is still sold today and is very effective for window washing, coffee house, RV, and other applications.
The semi-automatic control brought great convenience to homeowners, who now no longer had to deal with manually cleaning their systems. They now had to just fill a “brine tank” and clean their system when they felt it was appropriate. This was ground-brea
king technology that made life significantly more convenient and provided end-users with more uniform softened water.
Semi-automatic regeneration continued until the 1970′s when Intermountain Soft Water entered the product development foray under Albert Rowley’s leadership and in joint development will Bill Peltier at Erie controls to develop the first time-clock (day-timer)-based control. This control provided 
homeowners with the ability to schedule the regeneration of their water softener on an hourly schedule. While the hourly schedule was innovative, many homeowners were confused with a control that calculated “hours until regeneration”.
In 1978, under Albert and Robert Rowley’s joint initiative, Intermountain & Erie developed a controller that would actually display the time of day and allow the homeowner to choose a designated regeneration time that was intuitive and easy to understand. Homeowners could now schedule the days on which their water softener would clean itself, and at what time the cleaning would occur. This was described as a “fully-automatic” control in the industry.
Automatic controls were extremely effective, giving a homeowner total control over their softening efficiency and performance, but there was a movement afoot to create an on-demand water softening control that would clean based on water consumption and not on a calendar schedule. Erie Controls developed the 541 electronic cont
roller in 1983, revolutionizing the industry with a programmable logic controller (PLC) that would monitor and control the regeneration of a water softener. Fleck followed suit shortly after with a mechanically metered control (5600 Econominder) that was very reliable and is still in use today throughout the world.
Metered controls were programmed with a total capacity (gallons), and a reserve capacity (gallons) so that they could “intelligently” control when the system would clean. The reserve was a predicted volume of daily water consumption that would always remain available for use. At the designated regeneration time, the control would observe the remaining capacity and then determine if it was greater, equal to or less than the remaining capacity. If the remaining capacity was greater than the reserve the control wouldn’t clean. If the capacity remaining was equal to or less than the reserve then it would initiate a regeneration to ensure an uninterrupted supply of softened water.
The two industry powerhouses separately developed their technologies, with Erie focusing on electronics in Europe, and Fleck focusing on mechanics. Other players like Culligan, Ecowater, and Kinetico introduced their metered controls, and soon the industry at large began to drift towards metered controls.
Innovative dealers and manufacturers began evaluating the nature of metered controls and realized that the traditional “reserve” approach of guesstimating an average daily water consumption was lacking. The traditional approach was to estimate (guess) the family’s average daily consumption and then input that as the “reserve” into the water softener.
Fleck was first to market with a “variable reserve” control on the 6600 and 6700 electronic controls. The variable reserve control enabled improvements in functionality and efficiency, since the reserve was no longer fixed. This variable reserve ensured that if household water consumption decreased (someone leaving the home) or increased (new additions to the family or guests) that the control was able to accommodate.
Autotrol’s attempts at control electronics were very disappointing, and Erie stayed behind the curve during numerous acquisitions and mergers in the 1990′s.
There was a vacuum in the marketplace for an intelligent control that took more into account than just hardness, water consumption, and a day override. One inherent weakness with reserve-based systems is that the household might not necessarily use all of the reserve capacity on the day before the system regenerates. For example, the average daily consumption is 600 gallons, so the system adjusts itself to a 600 gallon reserve. The 600 hundred gallon reserve ensures that the household has enough water for the system to regenerate the next morning without running out of softened water. If the household only uses 100 gallons on that day, then 500 gallons of reserve capacity is wasted. Clearly, variable reserve was not enough.
Autotrol came through with a proportional brining method that regenerated the system every single day and only dispensed the exact amount of salt required for regeneration that day, derived as a proportion of overall system capacity. This approach works well on upflow (counter-current) systems but has problems when brining downflow (co-current). A daily cleaning also tends to waste backwash water, so the industry demanded mo
re…
Fleck introduced it’s variable brining algorithm on the 6700 ET controller in the mid-1990′s which was a very effective approach, especially on upflow systems. Fleck’s variable brining approach considered the following data when making regeneration decisions:
- Resin volume in cubic feet
- Brine line refill flow rate (BLFC)
- Brine dosage per cubic foot
This variable brining approach was extremely effective in maximizing brine efficiency during regeneration.
In the late 1990′s Intermountain’s R&D team noticed a dramatic decline in water quality throughout the Intermountain West, requiring the adoption of high kinetic resins that respond very quickly to waterborne ions and can remove metals in addition to calcium and magnesium hardness.Research from resin manufacturers as well as field studies showed that resin efficiency decreases over time and in the presence of metallic ions. It became evident that there was a lot more to producing good soft water than just shoving industry-standard resin into an industry-standard tank and brining it with salt.
Intermountain’s engineering management and R&D teams approached all the major manufacturers to provide the algorithm that would later be known as fractional brining. Corporate politics impeded speedy adoption and Intermountain was finally forced to introduce their own software algorithms to integrate into the control valves that they specify on water softeners, conditioners, and filtration systems that they sold in the United States and around the world.
Fractional Brining takes the following data into consideration when making decisions on when and how to clean the softener, conditioner, or filtration system:
- Water Hardness level
- Ferrous Iron level
- Resin Type (K-factor)
- Resin Volume
- Brine refill rate
- Brine concentration
- System Age
- Average Daily Water consumption over the last 30 days
- Average Daily Water consumption over the last 365 days
- Number of manual regenerations in the the last 30 days
- User-controlled “efficiency” level
Fractional Brining ensures that the benefits of advanced resins can be leverages, and that a water quality improvement system can be as efficient as possible.
In addition to addressing efficiency and water quality, fractional brining software ensures that a system is able to flush at least once a week to protect from accumulation of Heterotrophic Bacteria (HPC’s) in the media bed without wasting salt; if no water is used between scheduled regeneration overrides, then no salt is used either.
Fractional brining, another Innovation from the experts at Intermountain Water Products. Fractional brining software is available on all Evertech firmware and on select non-Evertech platforms. Consult with your local Intermountain Water Products representative for further details.